OPENING: Butter (R) Jennifer Garner stars in this political satire as an Iowa woman who expects to finally win her local butter-sculpting competition, only to see her supremacy challenged by a little girl (Yara Shahidi) with pr...

A beloved teen novel’s author turns it into a great teen movie.
KRISTIAN LIN

Stephen Chbosky’s coming-of-age novelette The Perks of Being a Wallflower was a huge hit when it was published in 1999, and the author received numerous offers to turn the book into a film. However, Chbosky held out because h...

OPENING: Compliance (R) This film by Craig Zobel (Great World of Sound) is about a mysterious prank caller who induces a fast-food outlet manager (Ann Dowd) to inflict a series of humiliations on her employee (Dreama Walker). A...

AA’s founder is the subject of this complex, nuanced documentary.
KRISTIAN LIN

The title of Bill W. refers to William G. Wilson, the former Wall Street securities analyst who lost his livelihood to alcoholism and the Great Depression and went on to found Alcoholics Anonymous. This documentary about his li...

Horrid girls misbehave in this comedy, and you can’t look away.
KRISTIAN LIN

Remember that post-Bridesmaids wave of ill-behaved female humor that I mentioned last week? It reaches high tide this week with Bachelorette, a comedy that is also about a bunch of bridesmaids and features one of the same actor...

For a film about writers, The Words isn’t particularly well written. Scripted and directed by Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, the movie features a familiar plotline: A struggling novelist stumbles on an unpublished manuscrip...

OPENING: Cosmopolis (R) David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel stars Robert Pattinson as a young financier whose world comes apart as he rides in a stretch limo across Manhattan for a haircut. Also with Juliet...

OPENING: The Last Ride (PG-13) Henry Thomas stars in this drama as country music legend Hank Williams, who in 1952 hires a local teenager (Jesse James) to drive him to his last concerts. Also with Fred Dalton Thompson, Kaley Cu...

“As far as I know, we’re the first ones,” said Paul Unger. The 43-year-old bassist for the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra was referring to the series of short documentary films that he has made along with filmmaker Erik Cl...

A Shepard leads his flock in this interesting, forgettable hybrid.
KRISTIAN LIN

Dax Shepard became famous as one of Ashton Kutcher’s crew of pranksters on the now-defunct TV show Punk’d before settling into a career of playing loudmouthed jerks in middling-to-bad comedy films. (I haven’t seen him on ...